Comic Strips That Should Be Made Into Movies
May 31, 2010As you probably saw, Dilbert may be made into a live-action movie. I came across an article today about comic strips that deserve movies. With Marmaduke and Garfield getting their own movies, maybe some good comic strips could get a chance on the silver screen.
Here’s the list. What do you think?
- Calvin and Hobbes
- Get Fuzzy
- Spy vs. Spy
- Bloom County/Outland
- Liberty Meadows
- FoxTrot
- Little Nemo in Slumberland
- Zippy the Pinhead
- Prince Valiant
You can see the rationale for each at Television Without Pity.
Bill Watterson did contemplate allowing Calvin & Hobbes to be animated, but in the end did not permit it, much to the disappointment of his syndicators, who would have made much money. Although Watterson appears to admire animation, he liked to remain in complete control — doing all the work himself — of his invention, and he would lose that were he to let animators work on it. But I’ve read that the critical obstacle was the difficulty of animation’s handling the central gimmick of the strip — that Hobbes is alive to Calvin, a plush animal to everyone else. For example, how would one handle Hobbes’s voice? From one point of view, Hobbes’s voice should just be Calvin’s, since Hobbes’s words are created by Calvin — at least, that’s one way of looking at it. But, of course, you couldn’t do that in a cartoon.
Thus, one couldn’t just “animate the strip”; animators would end up making something rather different. It might be good, but I think Watterson decided that if others were going to make something different, they should make something completely different, and not base it on his creation.
Comment by chas simmons — June 14, 2010 @ 5:18 pm